Dear Minister, may I ask a moment of your time for the following matter. That's how I started an e-mail message I wrote in December. In my mailbox this week the following news:

Ammar Najm Eddine Jalak was released without charge from the headquarters of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) on 22 January in Khartoum, Sudan.

Ammar Najm Eddine Jalak was reportedly tortured, and he has said that many other detainees whom he met in Debek Prison had also been tortured. He said that he suffered “very bad treatment, anything and everything you can imagine”. This included electric shocks. He said to Amnesty International: “Thank you so much. I was in a very bad situation, being tortured and no one knew anything about me. When they released me they told me that it was because of international pressure.”

I was one of the people who wrote letters asking for his release and expressing my concern that he might be tortured, because I write letters for the urgent action network of Amnesty International.

You can help too, if you have a little time to spare to write a letter. It costs me about 1 hour a month if I can e-mail the letters, a little more if I need to go to a post-office for it.

If you don't have the time or aren't sure you can commit to it, there's online actions you can take part in with a mouse click. In some countries you can even support appeals via text message. Check out http://www.amnestyusa.org, or find your country's Amnesty site on http://www.amnesty.org.